lydia's musical adventures in Sweden, 2012–2013

Last week Magnus Gustafsson came in as our guest teacher for two days. We spent the first day learning about an instrument classification system created (presumably in German) by Sachs and Hornbostel, learning the Swedish names of lots of obscure folk instruments from around the world, but with emphasis on ones from the Nordic countries. He had a fair number of cool sound clips with him but no visuals, so we augmented our lesson with pics from wikipedia as we went. Evidently there are multiple ways to put reeds in cowhorns. And, non-Nordic-wise, do all y’all know anyone who plays crwth, sarangi, or sheng?

On the second day, the dance class joined us, and we all learned about the history of European folk music and dance, and the development of couple dancing from older forms. We also talked about the massive undertaking of collecting and publishing tunes in Svenska Låtar between 1908–1940, and in other collections. Of the 100,000 tunes now collected (not all in SvL — its 24 volumes contain “only” about 8,000), a hefty 60% are polska tunes — though possibly in part because those were what the collectors were especially after. We also learned Magnus’s own classification system for polska types, and then had a little game of identifying types for a whole bunch of sample clips he played for us. Now we can turn to each other in a concert and say, hey, that’s a type 3 polska!

We have also had two sessions with Olov about nyckelharpa history. The first session was about older history, starting from the first of the angels-in-churches c.1350, important dates for developments of each new harpa type, and some names and dates and stories of important historical figures. Favorite random story: the Uppsala court documents of 1642 feature a dramatic tale about a nyckelharpa player who got into a scuffle with a blacksmith, hit him over the head with the instrument for offenses real and/or imagined, and then died in the ensuing struggle.

Olov’s second session picked up where we left off, adding lots more modern names and tracing the spread of nyckelharpa throughout the world. We also had a really interesting show-and-tell of older nyckelharpas, especially Olov’s own kontrabasharpa and silverbasharpa, and talked about what each one works best for.

We’re also scheduled for a class later with Sonia about Sahlström family history.

ESI runs a ~twice-monthly concert series, Tobotorsdag (Tobo Thursdays), and this week was the first of the season. Our guest artists were the Silverbasorkestern, whom I had vaguely supposed might all be playing silverbas harpa. But nope: of the six band members, only two are playing harpa — and one of those also plays a variety of other instruments, though never more than two at once (cittra and harmonica). They also had, let’s see, a fiddle, a bass, three guitars, and a uke — and I am probably forgetting something. Their show was kind of like a middle-of-Uppland version of a country band, all very good-humored, and it was great fun.

Afterward there was (of course) a fika break, and then a big session and dance in the main hall — players spread out along two sides of the perimeter, dancers in the middle. I played for a while but had to fold early because I was way underslept. Dang. It was nice to have some of our class-learned tunes surface in a “real” setting.

Also this past week:

• Switched allegiance in music theory class to “group 3” (the extra-curricular group), thus bowing out of simple sightreading and notation.
• First class in arrangement with Niklas. In which I can understand him just fine as long as he is also writing on the board and talking about things I already get.
• After two solid weeks of feeling inept at the changing of my bow hold, I finally had a couple of little breakthroughs and sorted some of it out, in time for my second lesson with Ditte. Progress! How many more hours in front of the mirror d’y’reckon it’ll take?